A LOVE tug granny is locked in a frantic race against the clock to care for her dead daughter’s children.

Christine Mackie’s grandchildren were robbed of their mother by drugs and are now all she has left to remember her daughter.

But time is running out and just a year after losing her daughter, at the tragically young age of 29, Christine from Newcastle, faces yet more agony as she launches a heartbreaking fight to take her grandchildren out of foster care and bring therm into the bosom of her own home.

The devoted grandma from the city’s West End is desperate to reunite them with their extended family.

But social services on Teesside where her daughter lived, have refused Christine the right because they say her terraced council house is too small and, at 49, she is too old to take on the responsibility.

Christine though insists the love they would be given would make up for any lack of space, and she has even applied to move house to take them on.

Social services have told Christine she is too old and warned that her grandchildren will soon be put up for adoption.

Christine rarely gets to see the children, who cannot be named for legal reasons, because they do not live nearby, but the grandma-of-nine, who also has another daughter and a son, said: “I write to the kids every week, and I can talk to the older ones over the phone.

“When I leave the children it’s heartbreaking. It’s hard for us, so I can’t imagine what it must be like for the children. I would rather they lived with us because we are family, than with strangers they don’t know.

“I have quite a lot of family, and a lot of support, so they would be well looked after. I would do anything to get them here. It’s what my daughter would have wanted.”

Christine holds down two jobs to make ends meet, working as a cleaner at Newcastle University and at a fruit and nut shop in the city’s Grainger Market.

But she says would give all of that up to spend time with the children.

“I would happily give up the next 10 years or more to dedicate to them,” said Christine, who lives with husband George, 48, a concierge for Your Homes Newcastle.

“The main thing is that they have their family around them.”

Christine is still haunted by the memories of the day her daughter died.

“When the police came I just collapsed,” she said. “I remember the police picking me up and putting me on the bed. I was just trying to get it sunk in to my head. It still hasn’t sunk in really.

“The little ones don’t understand because they were too young when she died. But when they see us, they say ‘Mam, mam’, because of the resemblance.”

Her daughter died at a rocky time in her young life, and Christine said it was agony to watch her life going downhill.

She said: “I could see her going from good to bad. She just fell in with the wrong crowd.”